The present invention relates to an air vent including a housing and an air guiding means that is swivel-mounted in the housing.
Various configurations of air vents are known from the prior art. They generally serve to adjust, in the desired manner, the volume and the direction of an air flow supplied to a vehicle interior for air conditioning. To this end, air vents have a mounting that allows a swiveling of the air guiding means in the housing. For example, a ball joint having a bearing shell and a ball head mounted in the bearing shell is commonly used for this purpose. In such a ball joint, the operating forces for swiveling the air guiding means and the holding forcing for the air guiding means may be adjusted using a clamping of the ball head in the bearing shell, i.e. the frictional resistance between the bearing shell and the ball head is adjusted by means of an appropriate pretension of the bearing shell around the ball head. Due to wear and age-related decline in the elasticity of the plastic materials used, the holding forces of such a ball joint may decrease in the course of time, which means that the holding forces of the air guiding means become increasingly smaller until the air guiding means no longer has sufficient hold in the housing to maintain a preset direction for the air flow. In an extreme case, a play may develop between the bearing shell and the ball head, which may result in an undesirable noise development in the vehicle.